Things I’ve Done Recently:

• http://myspace.com/iamaadesign
• http://myspace.com/allshallbowfl
• http://myspace.com/thefallaffair
• http://flickr.com/photos/zeerus (new work scattered throughout)

Places To Go:

• Heading to North Carolina for a week mid-june (Video Shoot for Battle of The Bands winner)
• Massachusetts in early August (court related matters with my father, but also a great networking opportunity)

If everything works as planned, Katie will be accompanying me on both trips, and by August, I’ll have my own vehicle. I’ve got a little bit more work scheduled for this month, including some promotion deals, and some big shows. Im really trying to get out of the MySpace rut, so a new portfolio will hopefully be coming soon.

Things To Spend Money On:

• Flickr Pro Account (Buy me one?)
• Go Media Arsenal (Goatbeard, Block Head, and Affliction)
• Julius Caesar Right Bicep Tattoo
• Sweet Release Left Bicep Tattoo

• Random Header Images in Cutline
  • I’ve had this set up for a quite a while now, due to the simple script packaged with the Cutline theme. But taking a second look at the website, the images, colored, caused too much conflict with the header. So I’ve desaturated and replaced them all.
• install Gravatars
  • Nothing to say really, been planning this one for years, but decided coding wasn’t really my game anymore. After a few minutes of digging through custom styles, Gravatars were up and working.
    
• replace masthead with rebranded logo
  • Personal identity logo modified to fit the look of the blog slightly, with two identical logos desaturated, and move out to the left and right of the original.
• create and implement informational footer
• match colors
• switch over from Georgia to Verdana

Sunday Randoms was a big part of my blogging life. I had all these interesting little tid-bits piled up, fogging my favorites, these interesting images, hilarious videos, magical audio clips. Sunday Randoms let me get it all out of my system, but slowly over time with work and my moving situation, sunday became just another day.

Anyway, I’ve decided to reinstate Sunday Randoms in a new form, Weekend Randoms. Work permitting, I’ll be using Saturday and Sunday as my new escape day.

If I’ve ever established any sort of friendship with you on AIM, you’ve undoubtedly seen various rough drafts for the next version of Textonic. But they’ve always been just that, rough drafts. After months and months of putting it off I’ve finally settled on a simple, clean design for my home.

Free time has been in abundance lately, so I’ve set a few goals for myself over the upcoming weeks, one of those being the completion of version 2. I’ll leave you with a small preview, something to keep you waiting. I’m not going to promise any solid date, but I’m hoping to have this done by Halloween, hopefully even sooner.

As for Random Shapes, I’m happy to be back in. After leaving the network I felt a sense of loneliness. The people I used to talk to were no longer reachable, and when I could converse with them I felt like an outsider, but that’s all better now that I am mode +v.

My design career is slowly starting to pick up. As ridiculous as it sounds, MySpace really is a great networking tool. It’s a great way to find people with the same interests as you, and people who may need your services. I’ve had a few offers for work, but nothing serious or high profile. As well as my MySpace initiative I’ve also made a significant network to align myself with a few great designers, hoping for a couple great jobs out of the deal. But in the meantime I need to find another job, I’m thinking in retail this time. The food service industry just isn’t for me.

I’ve been sitting here, thinking. Not about anything in particular, but rather everything as a whole. Relationships, design, work, life, the whole shebang. It’s really not all worth the bother. I try to keep things alive, but in one way or another everything fizzles out. My plans fall through, my relationships crumble, and I’ve reduced myself to a sort of socially inept fool. Don’t take this as a plea for help, some type of open suicide letter to the world. Because if there’s one thing on my mind, it’s definitely life, not death.

It’s time for a fresh start. Again. The friends bring problems, and problems bring drama. Drama I don’t need at this point in my life. I’m holding down a steady job, working steady hours, with a steady paycheck. The people come and go, and they all seem to be stuck in the same pattern. The pattern of redundancy that has attracted so many in the past. The same jobs, the same people, the same life. Over and over again. As for everything else, it all seems like a big laugh at this point. I push myself to work harder as a designer, but to no winning effort. Laziness takes over and I end up lounging around for hours on end, when I could be using my time to create something. Something that the whole world can see. What kind of idiot wastes such a beautiful canvas?

Dating is another problem. It’s always the same girl. They tease you, test you, and then treat you like another snack. I’d honestly love to have some sort of lasting relationship, the kind that can make me completely happy, inside and out. The kind that brings people together.

I suppose these are just the thoughts of some insomniac crying to an open audience for attention, but these are my thoughts, and I’ll stand by them, no matter how ridiculous they sound at 2:00 in the morning. According to my computer, it’s January 23rd, 2002, which translates into a nice long nap. Why oh why couldn’t I have been born Rip Van Winkle? Life would be so much easier if the years could pass like minutes.

To add to the problems, Matt Bob has announced his temporary withdrawal from the network as a community leader, and has left it to Joey Brooks of Milk Carton Designs. If you’ve ever visited the RS IRC channel then it’s obvious that Joey and myself have a rought history, and I simply feel that he is not in the right position to take over the network.

This, combined with a series of problems arising earlier this evening, has led to my withdrawal. I’m sorry to say goodbye to all these wonderful people, but leaving the rush of problems behind makes it all well worth it.

I sat down with my guidance counselor this past week, and found out even though I’m failing half my classes, I only need six more credits to graduate. So assuming I can pass my classes this year, I’l only have two full classes my senior year, leaving me with a lot more time to dedicate to my true passion, design.

I’ve been shopping around different colleges, trying to find one with an art program I can fall in love with. While I’ve stuck strictly to digital work in the past I now want to broaden my horizons, and so In the near future I’ll be diving deeper and deeper into other forms of media, especially illustrated art and photography. As for my regular work, I’ll still be continuing designing, and I still hope to get a new design pushed out sometime soon, but like pregnancy it’s a long process. And don’t worry, nobody in my immediate connection is pregnant, so no need to sound any alarms.

But it’s about that time I turn off my screen, strip to my nighties, and fall asleep to a good movie, so I bid adieu to you wonderful world, and hope to see you again sometime soon.

Virb is a new, but long awaited product from Unborn Media, the people behind popular music networking service PureVolume. While they’re not really known as social networking giants like MySpace, they are known for their beautiful designs and the amazing features that come with them, thanks in part to the Neubix team. While Virb is overall an amazing feat both from a UI Design perspective and from a basic user experience perspective, there are a few features that really stand out to me.

Virb Music / VirbTunes

As far as music goes, Virb is definitely on the top of my list for networking services. While Unborn hasn’t fully linked Purevolume with Virb, a feature many expect to see, they have borrowed the popular PV Music Player for Band Pages, allowing users to add songs and even create their own playlists. Above I’d compiled a simple playlist of my favorite music, easily organizable with a drag and drop interface. The first three songs on your playlist are automatically displayed on your profile, something MySpace has failed to incorporate, even years after its inception.

Another nifty music feature is VirbTunes, an Audioscrobbler like iTunes plugin that pulls information like your most frequently played songs, artists, and more, and displays that information on your Virb profile for everyone to see. But what if you don’t want this to be shown? Well, Virb makes it easy to redesign and reorganize your profile, so that’s no problem at all.

Virb Design Builder

For those of you familiar with the MySpace setup, you know how difficult it is to edit the look of your already unnatractive profile. You’re forced to copy and paste jarbled CSS into sections you’ve never even heard of, bringing your profile to a browser-crashing, unreadable low. Fortunately for the Virb users, Unborn has integrated a profile editor that’s both attractive and easy to use.

The editor makes use of the ColourMod application for color selection, and that’s pretty much it. It’s as easy as that. Choose your colors, and maybe change your fonts around, and the live preview window will show you exactly what’s been changed. This is probably my favorite feature of all, and I know it will save a lot of the non design savvy users a ton of time.

The Virb Dashboard / Your Home

Again, MySpace has been beaten when it comes to good design. The MySpace dashboard is bloated and covered with ads, forcing you to scroll down just to see if you have new messages or comments. In Virb’s case, everything is presented towards the top of the page with virtually no need for scrolling. Recent updates fromy our friends are displayed in a neat box with some nice AJAX hover effects, with Announcements, the equivalent of bulletins, displayed below that. The difference, you can now leave comments on bulletins.

To the left of that is your basic information box, informing you of new messages, comments, or friend requests, with a small amount of unobtrusive AdSense Ads below that, and finally your profile stats appear below that. Everything is, once again, easy on the eyes.

Now, as a final note, Virb is still in Beta mode, so things may load slow, or not work at all. I was also planning on covering the excellent photo organizing features, but time has not permitted me to do so. Either way, enjoy and make sure to check out Virb as soon as you can.

The avoidance of any color shift, even in the form of gradients, makes the design feel flat, bland, and overall unwelcoming. On the other hand, when you finally make your way to an individual blog post a slight gradient in the masthead makes the design seem much more friendly and user oriented.

While colors may not be a major problem, one thing I noticed that really bothered me was colum alignment between different rows of the homepage. Time failed to align even a single column between the different rows, or sections, of the front page, something that messes with your eyesight after viewing the page for a little while. It disrupts your train of thouht and throws off your reading pattern making another uncomfortable situation.

Though certain elements may bother me I do like the overall design and salute Time on being able to redesign their entire website without any major downtime, if there was any at all.

But all is not wasted, the lack of internet on my main PC has kept me from distractions and is really helping me focus on my design, and trust me, I’ve gotten a lot of that done. Now if only I could master that glowing starfield technique, because fractals are ever so ugly.